Looking to quickly get started with Node.js without learning bad habits? Node.js the Right Way is a short and concise—100 pages—book that you can easily read in an afternoon (maybe two if you’re following along with the examples), promising a focused, tutorial-based experience.

The book makes the assumption that you’re already somewhat familiar with programming and the JavaScript language in particular. Instead of wasting time with absolute basics, it dives right in to Node. The first two chapters explain what exactly Node is, and how the the event loop works. It covers the differences between synchronous and asynchronous tasks, illustrating the reason you want to avoid blocking I/O. The next two chapters deal with sockets, serializing data and message queues. Other sections deal with databases (using CouchDB as an example), unit tests, building and consuming RESTful APIs and single-page web apps.

If you work your way through the examples in the book, you’ll end up building a reasonably complex web app and batch-importing a bunch of data from Project Gutenberg.

Node.js the Right Way is the best introduction to Node that I’ve seen so far. It’s concise enough it won’t take up a lot of your time, covers things more thorougly than a 500-word blog post or hour-long screencast, and there’s no magic “just copy and paste this, I’m not going to bother explaining it.” You should come out of it knowing where to go to keep learning. It’s easy enough to think “I used Express for this, and Grunt for that. Maybe I should search for more information about those tools.”